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EDMONTON - In Toronto, they’re known as the Dixon Bloods. Or the Dixon City Bloods. Or the Dixon Goonies. Many — though not all — are Somali-Canadian.

According to Toronto police, the gang has been “networking with associates” in Edmonton since 2006.

Not so coincidentally, since 2006, more than 30 young Somali-Canadian men have been killed in Alberta, most in gang-related shootings and stabbings. About half those killings took place in Edmonton.

Det. Cory Buerger is a member of Edmonton’s gang unit, on secondment to ALERT, the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team.

For almost a decade, he’s tracked the rise of local drug gangs dominated by Somali-Canadians. All, he says, are tightly networked with Toronto groups.

“Dixon Blood members have been seen in Fort McMurray and Edmonton, but they’re not wearing their gang colours out here.”

Instead, he says, members in Alberta operate as free agents. They don’t stake out physical turf, as they have in Toronto. They’re mobile, customer-based, delivering drugs to their buyers. Buerger says the Bloods and their affiliates bring their drugs through Vancouver, but their guns from Ontario. Most are bought legally in the United States, then smuggled across the border near Windsor.

This June, after a year-long investigation, 17 Canadian police agencies, including the Edmonton Police Service and ALERT, executed a takedown of Dixon operations in Toronto, Windsor and Edmonton: Project Traveller.

Police made 44 arrests, and seized 42 guns and $3 million worth of narcotics, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana, LSD and crystal meth. Among those arrested was Edmonton’s Daud Hussein, 27.

Yet for all its scope, Project Traveller really made headlines because of its connection to Rob Ford.

Many of us — including American TV comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert — have been indulging in what you might call Schadenford, smirking at the antics of Toronto’s mayor, as he finally admitted he’d probably smoked crack in one of his drunken stupors. But all the snickering at Ford’s self-pitying confession, and at the revelation that infamous crack video was real, has obscured a deadly serious question.

Why was the mayor of Toronto partying with alleged gangsters?

Ford’s defenders call his admitted crack use a private, personal failing, not a political sin. But this is about more than a private citizen getting high.

It’s about the mayor’s alleged association with members of the violent Dixon Bloods.

It’s also about alleged efforts by the mayor’s staffers to obtain or destroy that incriminating video — efforts that have already led to one extortion charge.

Ford, remember, was photographed with his arms around three young men: Anthony Smith, Muhammad Khattak and Monir Kassim, all alleged Bloods.

Kassim and Khattak were arrested during Project Traveller.

Smith was gunned down in Toronto less than two months before Ford’s crack video hit the news. Khattak was shot and wounded at the same time.

One of the two men charged in those shootings was Hanad Mohamed, who was arrested in Fort McMurray on May 24. At the time, RCMP seized four cellphones in his possession — looking, perhaps, for the Ford video.

Toronto police say it was actually discovered last week, on a computer seized during Project Traveller. That raid took place less than a month after Gawker and the Toronto Star first reported that Mohamed Siad, another alleged Bloods member, had tried to sell the video to them. Siad reportedly wanted money to start a new life in Fort McMurray.

Yet while Kassim, Khattak, Siad and Mohamed are all under arrest (and Ford's driver, Sandro Lisi, is out on bail after his arrest), Rob Ford is still the unimpeachable mayor of Toronto.

Ahmed Hussen, president of the Canadian Somali Congress, has spearheaded efforts in Edmonton and Toronto to keep kids out of gangs. The Ford affair, he says, has smeared all Somali-Canadians, most of whom are law-abiding.

“We became collateral damage in the media’s pursuit of Mayor Ford,” he says. “It’s ironic. You have a situation where all these young men from our community are in jail, yet the mayor has never been questioned by the police, even though his best friend has been charged with extortion.”

Eventually, Torontonians will have to pass political judgment on their mayor. But however laughable Ford’s antics, the Dixon Bloods are no joke — and Ford’s high-profile recreational activity exacts a high human cost.

“A lot of families in our community have lost their sons to gun violence, both in Alberta and Ontario,” says Hussen.

Is it too much to expect our politicians to be part of the solution, not part of the problem?

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